Business Continuity: Europe And America Learn Only From Their Own Most Recent Experiences, SteelEye Survey Suggests

Despite their country's close association with the 'war on terror', just 1 percent of American businesses have documented terrorism as source of IT downtime, research shows. This tiny proportion is in contrast to the European response, where 12 percent of businesses have attributed downtime to terrorism. The 2006 SteelEye Technology Business Continuity Index also shows American companies fear power outage above everything except loss of network. Forty two percent of respondents rank power outage as likely to have a maximum impact on their business, while this figure falls to 29 percent in Europe.

The reason for this particular pair of differences between Europe and the USA may lie partly in the nature of human beings to look to the most recent history around them for guidance on future events:

• while there hasn't been a successful terrorist attack in the USA since 9/11, Europe has endured major urban incidents in both London and Madrid since then;
• and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused extensive, long term power outages across a huge area of America's southern states

John Banfield, EMEA Director, SteelEye Technology, Inc., said: "It seems likely that European IT managers have simply been ‘re-sensitised' to terrorism more recently than their USA counterparts, while American IT managers across the USA have been sensitised to the potential impact of power loss in a way unlikely to be recreated in Europe. The generally significant awareness in both Europe and America of power outages as potentially devastating events are likely due to the fact that both regions have, or have had, exposure to energy worries and/or blackouts in recent months or years."

Europeans are generally far more sanguine about things like maintenance, failures and outages, which appear as responses less commonly than in America. North American respondents fears network outage above all (58 percent rank as having maximum impact), while specific application failure haunts Europeans (49 percent ranks as having maximum impact; 42 percent ranking network outage the same way).

Remote disaster recovery sites are commonplace, with 87 percent of respondents across both regions acknowledging they have one. However, in Europe 39 percent of these are within same city compared with 21 percent in America, casting doubt on whether they are well-located – not least given Europe's present greater fear of terrorism. Perhaps reflecting a greater understanding of the scope of a natural disaster, almost 70 percent of North American DR sites are in a different State, while just 12 percent of European DR sites are in a different country.

Somewhat more surprisingly, of the 75 percent of companies of less than 500 people that have a BC plan, a further 75 percent have a remote DR site – a significant achievement on generally much tighter budgets. This group is all the more impressive because nearly 40 percent of these DR sites are genuinely remote: beyond the same city, county or state but within the same country.

Automated replication between primary and DR sites has been implemented by 79 percent of European, but only 60 percent of North American respondents. Failover clustering solutions are also considerably more prevalent in Europe: 53 vs. 29 percent.

Other key differences between respondents in Europe and America include the prevalence of Microsoft Windows as a platform for business critical applications, and a major attitude difference towards testing business continuity plans.

Eighty seven percent of European respondents run business critical applications on Microsoft Windows in Europe, but only 77 percent in North America. There doesn't appear to be a major operating system ‘big loser' on the other hand. The losers appear to be less common platforms: in Europe only 19 percent use minor operating systems for critical applications, as opposed to 27 percent in America.

Over 22 percent of European respondents test their business continuity plan monthly, a frequency matched by only 4 percent of North American respondents. There is a slight compensation in that 4.3 percent of North Americans test weekly (zero percent in Europe), but in other respects testing frequencies were comparable – including about 5 percent saying not at all.

About SteelEye Technology
SteelEye is a leading provider of data and application availability management solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery on Linux and Windows. The SteelEye LifeKeeper family of application-focused data replication, high availability clustering and disaster recovery solutions are easy to deploy and operate, and enable enterprises of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data. To complement its software solutions, SteelEye also provides a full range of high availability consulting and professional services to assist organizations with the assessment, design and implementation of solutions for ensuring High Availability within their environments. To learn more about SteelEye, visit www.steeleye.com. We are the High Availability Experts.